cooking

I read a lot of food blogs, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that everyone has kitchen failures sometimes, and they’re not because you can’t follow instructions, or you accidentally burn something. Sometimes a recipe is just not that good. Recently one of the authors of one of those blogs included a short list of recent failures to cheer up some readers who felt like it would be impossible to turn out such consistently amazing meals. I thought I would share a recent kitchen fail of my own here.

I rarely cook with beef, but a few weeks ago it was on sale and I picked some up, thinking I could make a beef stew in my crockpot before winter was out. I chopped it up (what a pain in the butt) and froze it, and then pulled out half of it last week to make this beef barley stew in my crockpot. This wasn’t the recipe I’d been thinking of when I got the beef – I have several pulled aside, but I also wanted to make something that didn’t require buying a lot of extra ingredients. Google to the rescue. Continue reading →